Twilio Changelog

We changed the TaskRouter out-of-box Task Channel’s friendly name from “Programmable Chat” to “Chat”. The unique name “chat” did not change. This is mostly just for information and should not have a significant impact on how you use TaskRouter or Flex.

We are excited to announce that Flex UI 2.0 is now available in Public Beta.

We are excited to announce that Flex Conversations is available in public beta.

Flex Conversations introduces the new async channel platform to easily build SMS/MMS, WhatsApp, and Chat channels in Flex. This release includes:

• Support for Conversations API, the single API to manage all asynchronous channels including SMS/MMS. WhatsApp, and Chat
• New Interactions API to set up and manage inbound and outbound communications
• An open source React based chat application to help you get started with creating and embedding webchat into your website
• Attachment support for all channels that support attachments
• Conversations support in Twilio Studio

Flex Conversations requires Flex UI 2.0. See the Flex UI 2.0 docs for more info and how to perform a migration.

You can read more about this launch on our blog, and if you’re ready to start building, dive into our docs.

In this release of Flex UI, we have introduced a Degraded mode for Flex UI - now Flex UI will initialize with limited capabilities, even if some of the components like SDK’s (TaskRouter, Conversations, Voice or Sync) are down. In case of disruptions in Twilio services, Flex User will be able to login to Flex and perform certain tasks that are still available. For example, in the case of Twilio Voice experiencing an incident, your agent will still be able to handle messaging tasks.

Users will see a notification informing them of a possible disruption in the normal operation of Flex UI and they will be able to download a thorough report with error details and logs.

For more on error handling and reporting, check out our Troubleshooting Flex UI guide.

Twilio has completed validation of the integration between Flex and Lionbridge Language Cloud real-time language translation solution. Using a database of over 110 languages, this integration enables your agents to send SMS, Chat or WhatsApp messages in their native languages, and have customers read them and send return messages in their native languages.

To learn more about Lionbridge capabilities and how to enable it for your application, visit our integration documentation.

TaskRouter now offers dedicated properties in the Workflow filter target to improve support for use cases where the agent is already known, e.g., because the customer previously spoke to that agent (‘last agent routing’) or has an existing relationship with that agent / advisor (‘preferred agent routing’).

Developers can utilize properties for either the agent’s Worker SID or Worker friendly_name in a Workflow filter target and specify the respective value on the Task.

Utilizing this feature will yield significant performance improvements over the general evaluation logic and prevent latencies during routing and assignment of such Tasks.

To learn more about the TaskRouter Known Agent Routing feature, please refer to our documentation on Known Agent Routing.

Flex Insights Historical Reporting now enables users of Analytics Portal outside of Flex to drill down to conversations in their hosted or self hosted Flex. When users click on individual calls, chats and emails in Historical Reporting they will no longer be sent to a standalone web application outside of Flex.

The Conversation screen in Flex provides more features, supports programmability and is integrated with other Flex features. All future improvements will also be added only to Flex’s Conversation screen. The conversation screen outside of Flex is now deprecated and will not get any new improvements.

We encourage existing customers to set up their Flex instance domain so they take advantage of this new feature. To keep the user experience intact users in all existing accounts by default drill down to the legacy conversation screen. Users in newly created accounts by default drill down to hosted Flex.

For more information check our documentation.

We have updated all Flex projects that use Automatic Updates to Flex UI 1.30.

This release of Flex UI includes Real-Time Queue Monitoring GA.This feature displays real-time metrics that are useful for managing queues during the day. We have added new default metrics - number of handled customers, number of abandoned customers, and SLA.

For more information check our documentation. Check how to enhance and customize queues monitoring programmatically.

For more details on this release, please visit the release notes for Flex UI.

Reminder: You can pin to individual versions of the Flex UI or manage your Automatic Updates within the Flex Admin UI.

The Flex Plugins CLI is now compatible with the latest version (version 3) of the Twilio CLI. This release also contains fixes to security vulnerabilities and minor bug fixes.

Upgrade your plugins to the latest version of the Flex Plugins CLI to leverage this feature.

Twilio has completed validation of the integration between Flex and Veridas Voice Biometrics digital authentication solution. Veridas allows agents to validate the identity of end users with 3 seconds of their voice in any language and assists with fraud prevention, processing data under strict data privacy standards.

To learn more about Veridas capabilities and how to enable it for your application, visit our integration documentation.